While new global HIV infection targets, including the recently adopted UNAIDS Fast Track targets—which aim for no more than 500 000 new infections among adults by 2020 and no more than 200 000 by 2030—have been well received, they are insufficient on their own to re-energize and guide country efforts in their national HIV response. […]
Category: Global health
Abhishek Yadav: Nepal struggles to cope with the aftermath of the earthquake
It was just another Saturday morning in Kathmandu city. Suddenly, the earth moved. “Earthquake!” I sounded the alarm as I gathered my family and clambered out of the house. Disoriented and panicked, my family and I ran out to a field adjacent to our community of about a hundred houses. I watched in disbelief as […]
The role of a health partnership: Development of a Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in Uganda
The past few decades have been marked by unprecedented interest in evidence based medicine (EBM), and a focus upon the use of innovative methods and protocols to provide valid and reliable information for healthcare (Greenhalgh, 2010). Evidence based healthcare has been indicated to be the most appropriate way of ensuring that patients receive the most effective […]
Jocalyn Clark: Bhutan is a happy land. But is it healthy?
How can one not feel joy in a place called Land of the Thunder Dragon, the traditional name for Bhutan, the tiny landlocked South Asian nation south of Tibet known for introducing the world to the gross national happiness index. If emptiness is your idea of happiness, as is mine, there’s not much to dislike. […]
Jane Morris: Making the glorification of anorexia a crime
I make a point of telling students that an eating disorder is an illness, not a crime. It’s a more controversial statement these days. Some of my patients continue to argue that anorexia is their lifestyle choice rather than an involuntary illness, and I’ve just learned that the lower house of the French Parliament has […]
Owen Bowden-Jones: New drugs, new harms, new clinical guidance
Mindmelt, Annihilation, Black Mamba, and Kronic. Welcome to the world of novel psychoactive substances (NPS), or so called “legal highs.” The past five years has seen an unprecedented increase in the number of these psychoactive drugs. European figures reveal that over 100 new NPS were detected across EU drug markets during 2014 alone. That number […]
Jocalyn Clark: Rana Plaza survivors—let down by some, lifted up by others
As the two year anniversary of the collapse of the Rana Plaza approaches—when over 1100 people were killed and 2500 injured, mostly women garment workers—the fight for compensation continues. The eight storey building outside Dhaka, which housed several clothing factories supplying major global brands, collapsed on 24 April 2013 in one of the world’s worst […]
Engaging medical diasporas with their country of origin
While discussion about the contributions of the African diaspora to their countries of origin is often centred on their financial and business resources, less attention is afforded to their participation in healthcare. Despite an attempt by the Ugandan government to engage with its diaspora community through a diaspora desk, we still lack a comprehensive engagement plan […]
Rui Tato Marinho: Travelling, learning, and futuring in Mozambique
Last September I was in Mozambique, trying to find my grandparents’ house in the city of Beira. The house is there, still alive. They left Mozambique 50 years ago. Mozambique is a Portuguese speaking country, in the southeast of Africa with 27 million inhabitants. Besides the curiosity to know a little bit about my family […]
Bernard Merkel: Measuring the performance of health systems—a troubled history
The World Health Organization has never been the most radical or dynamic body, which—as an international, public, administrative organisation with a ferociously complex governance structure—is not entirely surprising. But in its annual World Health Report of 2000, it did something that was in its own way quite revolutionary: it produced a ranking of the performance of the […]